


there was almost sadness in her eyes

by Aesoleucian



Series: Gertrude Robinson's Extremely Temporary Home for Directionless Young Men [4]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Corpse Desecration, Gen, gertrude continues to be the second worst mom in the universe, mild emeto warn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-26 22:39:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16690273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: After Gerard dies, there's just one more thing to take care of, and then she can be done with him.





	there was almost sadness in her eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Like the tags up there say, mild emeto and gore warning. YES Gertrude had to carve him up to put him in that book.

Gertrude wanted to see the moment of his death with her own eyes. She has never seen a human die before—she has never seen the qualia of aliveness leave someone. So she wanted to see it. She has been with him for most of the day since he began seizing in the café where they were working—to be perfectly clear, Gertrude was not the one who called the hospital. She had no reason to believe it would have helped. It was some nosy bystander who thought she understood what was happening. Because of that woman’s prurience Gertrude sat by his bed for almost ten hours in the certain knowledge of how and when he would die. Plenty of time to become sure that it is a punishment for using the power of Beholding without being truly devoted to it—a punishment Gertrude would not have suffered if _she_ had done what she asked him to do. And she, of all people, should have known, given what happened to Jan more and more toward the end.

If she hadn’t spent sixty years learning to ignore any and all messages from her body, she would not have been in the toilet when he died. But this, this will be almost as interesting. She has never died before either, and it will be a novel experience.

So she vanishes from the hospital and turns off her phone so that she cannot be found to make any decisions regarding her ‘son’s’ body. More importantly, neither can her identification be checked. She comes back the following night to find him in the morgue. In death his brow is furrowed in pain, like it was so often in the last months of his life. He genuinely looks, in the blue-white light of her phone’s flashlight, like he is going to sit up at any moment and start rubbing at his forehead, complaining of a migraine. Always centered, as he put it, on his third eye. But Gertrude has no time to stand here staring at him. She has to work quickly.

She does turn on the light, reasoning that it will be no more obvious than her flashlight, and then she throws the sheet off him and heaves him onto his front so she can cut open the back of his thin hospital shirt. She makes a test cut with her scalpel high up on his shoulder. Yes, his flesh still has a workable texture. She suppresses bile that threatens to work its way up to her throat and uncaps a sharpie from her bag.

And then she Looks for his moment of death, the only time she will allow herself to use that power. Her lips twitch in satisfaction as she reads his dying thoughts off his back, and then writes them where she read them.

Now she only needs to remove the skin. Theoretically she understands how, but Gertrude has never skinned so much as a rabbit before; she is a thoroughly modern creature. She cannot deny to herself how disturbing it is to dissect not a man’s mind but his flesh. Perhaps more disturbing is that blood oozes out only slowly. It is a sign that all the life has thoroughly gone out of him, that what was once a thinking person—what once smiled wryly and sighed and never failed to remember her favorite takeaway orders—is now a slab of meat with the most tenuous connection to his spirit. Still, a connection she can exploit.

She finishes the job and turns over the roughly rectangular slice of skin—she cut it thick to avoid damaging the writing, so she will have to scrape the other side. She narrowly avoids vomiting, if only because she does not have time to vomit. The most important thing now is to get him into the book, or this will have been effort wasted. She trades her scalpel for a broad-bladed knife and begins scraping, letting the extra… scraps fall into his black-blooded back. Then trimming the edges to the appropriate size, she pulls off her gloves, bags them, and opens the book. When she aligns his page it bonds eagerly with a kind of pulpy sound.

Only after it’s done does she question why she did it. Something in her aches, distant and foreign, and she cannot stop herself from asking other question (if only in the privacy of her own head): would she have done this for Jan? For Michael, fool that he was? For Eli, Marcus, for Yunfa, for Stepan—? Part of her is comforted by the idea of keeping a permanent record of her sacrifices. It’s satisfying in the same way as a well-organized archive, a pleasure she has denied herself for decades. But the part of her that wants to keep suspended human spirits without ever using them for anything—they are, after all, useless!—must be the Archivist. She should burn this book right now.

Instead of taking the lighter out of her bag she looks down at the book and starts to read aloud.

“His consciousness faded in and out like the tide. He tried to refuse their drugs, though for what purpose even he could not have said. Perhaps he was simply trying to push away the smell of disinfectant and grief that rose from his hospital bed. She was there sometimes, the one he had followed around the world. There was almost sadness in her eyes.”

“Ma’am? Ma’am, you’re not supposed to be down here.”

“He felt himself begin to slip, the icy certainty of what was happening seeping through his flesh, and as he fell away for the final time, he felt that all-consuming fear. And his only thought was to cry out for his mother.”

“Ma’am, technically you’re trespassing.”

“But with the last vestige of his stubborn will, he refused. She would not claim his last moment. He was silent.”

“Can you hear m—what the hell happened to him?”

“And so…” Her throat closes up.

And so Gertrude closes the book. Perhaps she is relieved to have a reason to stop. Perhaps she does not want to see him again. She turns away from him for the last time and says, “Oh, I’m so sorry! I just wanted to see him one more time but something—something _awful_ has been done to him. I had to pray for him.”

They won’t find the bloody latex gloves, the scalpel, or the knife. They won’t be able to see any of it, so there’s no problem. She sets the book down on the stainless steel counter to spin an earnest story about being too late to be with him as he died. She leaves it behind when she’s released from prison after the trespassing charges fail to stick. She does not ever think about the book as she returns to her investigation; nor does she think about Gerard, precisely. She only thinks of him tangentially, as it relates to thinking about the hole he has left. Her tongue is as self-possessed as it has ever been but her mind keeps momentarily considering _table for two_ and _where is that boy at this hour?_

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters for long, in the face of Unknowing. She leans forward and focuses her eyes.


End file.
